with Liz Butler and John Warnow
notes by Donna Barker
What got you involved in the activist movement/advocacy/social change?
➢ Friends invited me to a rally
➢ My grandmother
➢ Earth Day, 1998
➢ I was working and burnt out and decided if my life was going to suck I wanted it to be for a good reason
➢ I had good teachers
➢ I used to watch National Geographic instead of Sesame Street
➢ Junior High teacher told me my generation had to get its shit together
➢ Dinner with friends who told me about an organization I should join
➢ My family instilled values and my university situation fermented into action
➢ Family and spirituality
➢ Brother in law is an activist and he asked me to help out
➢ Shock during my first year of university to see inequality in the world
➢ Making a final commitment to be a vegetarian and researching the meat industry and the power of corporations shocked me
➢ Spirituality and personal elements and a bad break-up
➢ When I was 7 I lived in Paris for 6 weeks and saw a homeless person for the first time
➢ Moved to DC to escape rural America and found opportunities to make change that aren’t available anywhere else
➢ I grew up in a family of Cape Breton socialists with salt of the Earth prairie farm folk
➢ When I was a kid I went to pro-choice rallies with the head of my church and my mom at 8 years old
We have to step back to look at what gets people engaged and what starts them down this path. The internet is now our tool to find people but that is tapping into the stuff we all mentioned only on a cursory level. Most of what gets people involved is a major inter- personal interaction.
How do we come as close as possible to get people to face to face.
People sign things online that they don’t remember or don’t understand. It doesn’t get them committed to the cause.
Getting someone out on the street or getting them to write a cheque proved a stronger belief in and connection to the outcome of the campaign.
Does anyone have a personal friend who they’ve never met and only ever emailed? It’s rare. But you can meet someone once and email for years and feel like they’re a friend.
